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Good practice

On the topic of Access to Finance for small and medium enterprises, COPIE offers ESF and ERDF Managing Authorities the following tool:

• Manual on Access to Finance for ESF Managing Authorities in Europe

The manual combines information, experience, tools and examples from the COPIE partnership and the wider microfinance community in Europe that is relevant to the design of microfinance operations under the ESF.

More specifically, the guide

Addresses strategic and operational issues in microfinance systems,

Presents tools, methods and checklists to identify and assesses policy as well as policy implementation issues and options,

Analyses the legal and institutional environment,

Discusses good governance and the linkages between financial institutions and business,

This framework is designed to detect, describe and analyse good practices of support on access to finance in partner countries. It is inspired by the COPIE 1 Framework and the IMPART Peer Review Manual. The intent is not to ‘dictate’ one practice but to support a diverse range of approaches that work well within a specific context through a shared framework of basic good practice principles. The Evaluation and Assessment Framework includes a description of practices by the country or region concerned, a secondary analysis of the COPIE lead expert and a 1.5 peer review workshop.

The peer review is a method based on the exchange of experiences between a 'host country' who presents and wishes to gain feedback on an effective policy (and associated good practice), and 'peer countries' who are interested in:

learning from the host example and potentially transferring it into their national setting; and

sharing their own policy experiences with the host and other participating countries.

Hence, the process is very much based on a two-way exchange. The peer review takes place over the course of 1.5 days in the host country with representatives from up to 12 peer countries. Each country is represented by a national government official and an independent expert.

The peer review includes presentations on the host country policy example, a round table of the peer countries‟ experiences, followed by a number of working group discussions to facilitate mutual exchange and learning.

Each peer review also includes a study visit organised by the host country where participants can see the direct application and impact of policy on the ground.

Please find the peer-review related documents from the last COPIE Access to Finance peer review in Brussels in May 2011 here (zip, 1,6 MB).

For the presentations of individual speakers please go to the Thematic Group area.

For more information on the thematic group on Access to Finance please see here.